Short-story master Alice Munro wins Nobel Prize for lit

Alice Munro retooled the conventional short story structure, moving backward or forward in time after the story opens. Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The selection of Munro is a departure for the Nobel committee, whose selections in recent years have been politically tinged.

Photo: Ian Willms / New York Times

Alice Munro, the renowned Canadian short-story writer whose work explores the tangled relationships between men and women, small-town existence and the fallibility of memory, won the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday.

Munro, 82, is the 13th woman to win the prize.

Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy said Munro is a “master of the contemporary short story.”

Munro, who lives in Clinton, Ontario, told the Toronto Globe and Mail earlier this year that she planned to retire after “Dear Life,” her 14th story collection.

In a statement from Penguin Random House, her publisher, Munro said she was “amazed and very grateful.”

“I'm particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians,” she said. “I'm happy, too, that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing.”

Munro revolutionized the architecture of short stories, often beginning a story in an unexpected place, then moving backward or forward in time.

She brought a modesty and subtle wit to her work that admirers often traced to her background growing up in rural Canada.

She said she fell into writing short stories, the form that would make her famous, somewhat by accident.

“For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,” she told the New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.”

The Nobel is given to a writer for a lifetime's body of work, rather than a single novel, short story or collection. The winner receives about $1.2 million.

While the Nobel Committee has in recent years been overtly political with its choice of winners, its selection of Munro resonated for more purely literary reasons, touching off a wave of celebration on Twitter.